The McConnell challenge that wasn't

Matt Bevin seemed like the ideal candidate to challenge Mitch McConnell. The handsome and personable businessman, a father of nine, impressed national conservative groups looking for a chance to knock off the Senate Republican leader.

These groups, from the Senate Conservatives Fund to FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Patriots and the Madison Project, invested more than $1 million in the Kentucky GOP primary. Bevin himself spent more than $3 million, including $1 million of his own fortune.

Bevin, a 47-year-old first-time campaigner, underestimated the scale of the challenge while overestimating his own abilities. The 72-year-old McConnell, a notoriously ruthless campaigner who has internalized important lessons from the last two election cycles, went after Bevin before he could even begin to make his case to voters.

Bevin’s not giving up. As he flew around the state Monday, his campaign touted a rosy poll from the conservative site Human Events that shows him trailing only 48 percent to 34 percent. “With McConnell under 50 percent and 18 percent still undecided, Bevin can make up for the 14 point gap on election day,” a press release claimed.

Questionable spin aside, here are the five key reasons Bevin never really got off the ground:

Bevin wasn’t prepared for a race of this magnitude.

It takes a certain level of self-confidence to make your first run for public office a primary challenge against one of the most powerful Republicans in the country.

For Bevin, that bordered on hubris.

“There’s literally nothing in my life that, if it were on the front page of a newspaper, would bother me,” he said in a January interview. “I’m a rare person who is fortunate enough to say that.”

Yet, that claim was tested, week after week, as a steady stream of damaging stories that Bevin apparently hadn’t anticipated kept materializing.

His LinkedIn page suggested that he earned a master’s degree from MIT, for instance, when he actually attended a three-week seminar that had no official link to the university. And as POLITICO reported in February, even though Bevin made opposing the 2008 federal bailouts a centerpiece of his campaign, he had praised them back in 2008 as an investment fund president.

Bevin could have made it to Congress if he’d taken another path. McConnell loyalists tried to recruit him to run against Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth in 2012. They thought that the former Army officer would make a very strong House candidate. A Senate campaign against someone of McConnell’s stature, with the high scrutiny it entails, was a different ballgame.

McConnell never let Bevin get traction.

As Bevin flirted with a run and introduced himself to tea party groups, McConnell’s research team went ahead and put together thick binders of opposition research on the would-be challenger. It was a shrewd decision that let McConnell effectively define Bevin in the minds of voters before he could begin to present his own narrative.

“Hit him right out of the box,” a McConnell adviser said. “That comes straight from Mitch McConnell — the full court defense. It you keep applying consistent pressure, you’re going to force mistakes.”

Within 24 hours of the Bevin campaign’s launch last July, McConnell was out with a six-figure ad buy attacking Bevin for seeking a government “bailout” to help rebuild his family’s bell factory in Connecticut after it burned down. As the days went on, outside groups separate from but loyal to McConnell also piled on.

“Is he surprised that Mitch McConnell didn’t roll over? If so, he’s the most naïve guy in the world,” said Scott Jennings, a former McConnell adviser who is helping the pro-McConnell super PAC Kentuckians for Strong Leadership.

Bevin’s rookie mistakes kept him on defense.

Nothing illustrates the limits of Bevin’s political acumen like his decision to speak at a pro-cockfighting rally in late March, an episode that ultimately led to an embarrassing mea culpa.

On April 2, Bevin told a local reporter that he was “the first person to speak” and left immediately after. The next day on the radio he said he thought it was “a state’s rights rally,” but then he defended cockfighting. Three weeks later, a local TV affiliate aired undercover video from the rally that showed Bevin saying cockfighting should not be criminalized.